インタビューで英語のリスニングをレベルアップ！！

The first edition of How to Report Statistics in Medicine consists of three parts and fifteen chapters. Again this points to the fact that if you are going to be a scientist, you have chosen to be a writer. The two skills go hand in hand. You cannot do one without the other. They are both there.

Now many authors create what we call, "writer-based texts" and these are texts where there is no sense of audience involved. There is no sense of a concept of a reader and meeting the reader's needs for information. It is more of "I will provide a data dump." I will give you all the information that I have on this topic and I will expect the reader to sort this out and put it together and so forth. What we want to create are reader-based texts. And these are texts that are designed specifically to meet the reader's need for information and not the author's need for self-expression.

You then have to have an image of the reader. Who is the audience for your paper. Now most authors are completely unaware of who reads medical journals. The standard phrase that you get is "I don't have to understand this, my readers will know." And the question is then, "Well, who are your readers?" "Well I am writing for other oncologists or I am writing for other orthopedists, whatever it is." If you look at those journals and you ask who is reading these journals, yes, they are read by oncologists and orthopedists, but they are also read by nurses, by lab techs, by basic scientists, by patients, by people who are preparing materials for patients. They are read by people who are occasionally working in a related area, for example, biophysics, and who read a paper on bone surgery or something.

So in fact, most authors do not have a clear idea of who they are writing for. My suggestion is that the target audience be Juan and Juanita who are two fictitious nurses from Spain. English is not their primary language. They have medical training but not at the doctoral level. They have access to all the standard reference books that I have access to, a medical dictionary, a book of abbreviations, standard references on anatomy, physiology, scientific style and format and this sort of thing.

If Juan and Juanita can understand the article that I have edited, I am pretty sure that the peer reviewers, the journal editor and that the primary audience for the journal will be able to understand that article as well. So that is the target that I recommend people shoot for.

Now when we talk about levels of abilities in medical writing or levels of evaluating a scientific article, I have a model that now has five steps. The first step being language acquisition which is probably not the correct term, but it is the one that I have used most recently. If people are still in the process of acquiring the English language, they are going to have a great deal of trouble in simply expressing themselves in English. And this would be word choice, word order, spelling and whatnot.

But assuming that someone is a native English speaker or has hired a sufficient level of English ability, the second step in evaluating the manuscript is the copy editing level and this is style and format. It is spelling, grammar, syntax, format requirements for the journal's guidelines, you know, how wide are the margins, what type of font should be used in a table and so forth.

Copy editing is very important and there are some people who do it much better than others. The best copy editor I ever met was a young woman with a high school education who as a proofreader detected a change in the type font between the quotation marks at the beginning of a quote and the quotation marks at the end of a quote. This ability for proofreading and copy editing is phenomenal, but that is what it takes. An attention to detail, often times apparently arbitrary detail. Is milliliters small "m" capital "L" (Note Mr. Lang misspeaks here and actually says "l") or is it small "m" small "l"? This sort of thing.

The next level up from copy editing is what I would call substantive editing and here we are dealing with the rhetorical structure of the paper, the internal logic, the structure of the argument. Does "A" lead to "B" lead to "C" lead to "D"? We are talking about the ability of the editor or an author to integrate the text and the figures and the tables so that they all say the same thing and that they work together to create a good communicative paper. Here we would be dealing with much improved word choice, sentence structure, title would need to be appropriate, the abstract tightly written. This sort of thing.

The fourth level up is what I have called analytical editing and here is where the medical writer, editor or the author is able to comment on the quality of the research designs and activities and the statistical analyses and presentation. For example, knowing the difference between allocation concealment and blinding in a randomized trial is an important characteristic. In analytical editing we would begin to see the application of guidelines for a number of research designs, CONSORT, systematic reviews of meta-analysis, the core statement, meta-analysis of observational studies in epidemiology and so forth.

The second edition of my book How to Report Statistics in Medicine contains eight new chapters from the first edition. Four of those chapters are detailed guidelines for reporting the four basic research designs used in medicine: randomized controlled trials, case controlled studies, cohort studies and surveys or cross-sectional studies. The ability to apply those guidelines, to evaluate an article, to see if those guidelines have been met or should be met, I would include as analytical editing.

The fifth and final stage of the model that I would use for evaluating the credibility of a scientific article is the peer review stage. And the peer review supposes that the content expertise is equal to that of the author, equal to that of the intended readers. It may involve understanding the research designs and activities and the standard statistical methods or data collection methods used in the discipline. But it is really the full ability to comment on the content of the research as well as the presentation of the research.